A GIF version of the Flashed Face Animation Effect has been making the rounds recently, prompting us to ask: why the hell do these faces look so grotesque and distorted when we're not focusing our eyes on them? We spoke to a neuroscientist to find out.

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The answer may have to do with the lack of information going to our visual cortex. Neuroscientist Mark Changizi explained it to me this way:

Because the faces are in the periphery, there's not enough information for the brain to realize it's a bunch of different people's faces appended one after another — something that's very non-natural. Instead, the brain presumes the reasonable: that it's a single person's face in the periphery, and then the face-changes are treated as this person's facial expression changes. Basically, each of those photographs has a different resting face expression, relative to the one before it, and these become drastic, cartoon-like, facial expressions on a single dynamic monstrously cartoon-like expressive creature.